Someone explain to me why people play this game still and why it got like 1/4 of the population of the Nordic region playing it all around the globe?

First of all it's pretty casual - don't let any of those "hardcore" wannabes tell you anything about how hardcore WoW is supposed to be, because it's not - and a lot of the content caters to casual time spending.

There's simply a lot to spend your time on once you're finished levelling, even if you do not participate in the usual MMORPG endgame content (content for various group sizes and pvp).

Also, it's release was timed perfectly, with the advent of affordable broadband internet and it was perfectly casual. The only MMORPG of its time where getting to the maximum level was actually doable alone (Everquest, which was also going strong at the time, had the normal world populated by mobs that would be stuck inside instanced raids in WoW).

It also had a slew of new and innovative features, like respeccing your class to try something else instead of having to level up a different class, massive use of instanced content, mob locking, built-in protection against ninja looting and all that rad.

Being based on a massively popular franchise like Warcraft also helped. WoW would never have attracted the mass of players it did if it had been a completely new, unestablished IP.

Last, but not least, Blizzard is intentionally vague their player numbers for PR reasons. The amount of active subscibers to the game is estimated to be somewhere around 3 to 4 million, which by all other MMORPG standards is still a LOT, but it's nowhere near those numbers they usually release (7-10 millions, depending on how far down the road we are in a new expansion's content cycle).

That's mostly because they offer other payment mechanics for the Asian market - especially Chinese players are paying per hour, not a monthly subscription, so here they do count *accounts* as *subscribers* - which simply isn't true.

Income from those player accounts, which are by far the bulk of the "10 million" number is much smaller than the classical Western subscription. WoW has essentially been hemorrhaging subscribers and players for several years now.

If you look at the stable player numbers of other successful MMOs one can clearly see that WoW was that one in a million combination of being the right game, at the right place, at the right time. Nothing ever since has come close, and most likely nothing else will ever come close again.

The MMORPG market is massively saturated, something which EA learned with SWTOR. Lucky for me SWTOR recovered with their F2P option though. Heh.

Yeah, it was indeed a good fortune for Blizzard where everything conspired to make it a success financially. Once it took on critical mass, it became the de-facto standard in MMO's so to speak. It was the default option for people to go to when starting out in MMO's, because odds were, either your friends or family or friends friends would be playing.

Never tried it, but I'm a SWTOR regular (despite it being Star Wars, not because of it). Tried out the f2p option, liked it enough to become a subscriber and has been playing regularly since when I have a bit of spare time. Got two level 55 characters now

I still proclaim that Blizzard never ever make something innovative yet they are praised for polishing others creations.

When Valve took up the Icefrogs offer with Dota 2 Blizzard went butthurt and started to nag over copy rights about names they proclaimed belonged to their Wacraft franchise. Like Doom Bringer, Outworld Destroyer, Windrunner and Necrolyte who had to change their names. We better watch it if they trademark Winterwind or our forum names or real names or something.

Thanks for the big big posts and explanation Majesty!

I still hope WoW fails and dies. It stagnated the market and turned it into a pretty stale, grindy and boring genre.

I see a strange formula to

We want new WoWSomeone makes another game, the WoW killer.

People complain on lack of content (which WoW did not have either) And give it no chance.

We also have this

New MMO, not similar to WoW = This is not like WoW, I dont like it, I will go back to WoW (also added in to this is the "lack of content" whine)New MMO, similar to WoW = This is like WoW, I dont like it, I will go back to WoW (also "lack of content" whine)

So well! I hope it dies and I hope Blizzard do dare try something new soon. Instead of taking old ideas like Everquest and turning it into something for the masses. We dont need more casual crap. TOR was WoW in space also.

Dont know if its true but I heard there is asians MMOs popular in Asia who make WoW look like a dwarf. Think this is true? Population wise I guess it could be but economy wise I say not so likely,

I still proclaim that Blizzard never ever make something innovative yet they are praised for polishing others creations.

That's true... nowadays. It wasn't always like this.

Quote:

I still hope WoW fails and dies. It stagnated the market and turned it into a pretty stale, grindy and boring genre.

It's on the market for nine years now. For more than eight years of those now it has the most subscribers in the entire genre and a whole lot of pay-per-hour players. Even if everyone quit tomorrow it still wouldn't have failed. It was *the* defining success in the MMORPG genre.

You also didn't really read what I wrote. WoW is casual as hell. Even in the times when it just came out and really did include a few boring, grindy parts it was a truckload less grindy than any alternative at the time. WoW never had named mob camping like Everquest did for instance. Camping the spawnpoint of a mob that randomly decides to appear once every week? Yeah. THAT was boring and grindy.

WoW was the huge smash hit it was precisely because it was very accessible. It still is a great game at its core, even if all the new content in recent years has been less than enticing (and I raided relatively successful throught Cataclysm, which was probably the worst WoW addon ever).

Quote:

We want new WoWSomeone makes another game, the WoW killer.

People complain on lack of content (which WoW did not have either) And give it no chance.

True, when WoW came out it had frighteningly little end-game content a lot more time to get it out before players hit maximum level. That's a situation you cannot recreate which means that you either launch with a lot of content, or do user generated content somehow, like Neverwinter Online did - or you go the pay2play or free2play route.

Quote:

So well! I hope it dies and I hope Blizzard do dare try something new soon. Instead of taking old ideas like Everquest and turning it into something for the masses. We dont need more casual crap. TOR was WoW in space also.

WoW will die only when Blizzard pulls the plug. Which, with the apparent failure of "Titan" seems more and more unlikely.

ToR's a bit more than WoW in space right now, and come December 3rd, it'll have space PVP. Which will set it apart from all other MMORGPs out there. Can barely wait.

Quote:

Dont know if its true but I heard there is asians MMOs popular in Asia who make WoW look like a dwarf. Think this is true? Population wise I guess it could be but economy wise I say not so likely,

I presume you are a TOR Player by the way? Or are you just sarcastic when you say you wait for that space PvP? Smileys are confusing!

Beta / Early Access ToR player, yes - and I am really looking forward to space PVP. Since it looks to have Descent style controls it'll be rather similar to say FPSing, something I once was really good at (though that's 15 years past now).

Blizzard knows how to make damn good 10 man PvE content. While other MMO's have found their place in optimizing other parts of their game-- swtor has non nosebleed quests, guild wars has its pvp, but blizzard has chosen to focus on making interesting and challenging fights which require a fairly large group (10-25 players) of people who all know how to play their unique role well. It's among the most delightful team-play in gaming, with new content being released frequently enough to keep it interesting. While it is not unique to have fights with vastly differing mechanics and players with vastly differing roles, very few games take it as far as WoW where practically no [endgame] fights are as simple as hack and slash and where players of different classes have literally no idea how to do the others role.

Blizz has largely realized that grinding makes people sick, so they've backed off on that (the amount of time it takes to do anything these days is a fraction of what it took in previous expansions) but there's still a little bit of that and it frustrates me. What's nice is that they've never planned on releasing sequels, only expansions, so any rewards from shitloads of grinding are still there, although the value of many of those has diminished over time. Still, for me it seems like all the content up until raids should be as brief as conceivably possible because i friggen hate killing boars.

_________________Warning: The post you just read may contain little to no content, by reading this you hereby agree that it was read it at your sole discretion.

Bioware's currently doing quite well with their form of raids (called operations). The initial ones at launch were a bit on the easy side but the current ones are actually quite fun and the nightmare modes are just that, a veritable nightmare, but Bioware's design philosophy is a tad different.

They always said the wanted to keep operations small enough to be done in "one evening" and so far every one of them had a nightmare mode timerun where you got a title for clearing the operation in under two hours.

Which means that there are no 14 boss raids in SWTOR and there never will be (the largest one to date had 7 bosses, and the new ones have 5 bosses in 2 seperate instances), but I don't mind that much. The atmosphere of those operations is also much tighter than anything Blizzard released since Ulduar - however I can understand that not playing a major part for other gamers.

Assuming EA lets Bioware work on their PVE content in peace, which isn't really a given, I expect much of them in the next year.

Also, for me as a healer, SWTOR is a much more fun game in PVE (and PVP). Tiered mana (energy, heat or force respectively) regeneration rate forcing you to ACTUALLY triage heal without gear affecting it was a massive change at first, but it really makes for a much more interesting game.

So far, for all their promises, Blizzard failed with their intended healer change in every expansion since they turned it into a game of Whack-A-Mole in Wrath, and it really doesn't look like it's going to change with Warlords. Triage my Tauren ass, Blizzard.

Truth be told, I was really happy to have found something else to raid in. Cataclysm, especially the initial raids and Firelands with its associated daily quest hub ruined WoW for me, most likely for good.

World of Warcraft is a very different game in MoP than it was in Cata. I think that lots of people really didn't like cataclysm, myself included. The only raid of that era i really like was Blackwing Descent, which i thought had some really interesting fights.

Lots of current WoW players believe that the Throne of Thunder and Seige of Orgrimmar are the two best raids blizzard has ever put out, they both include a plethora of interesting fights.

I'm also a healer on my main, and i agree it is sort of a wackamole. The number values that healers can put out quickly can quickly dwarf actual health bars these days, but the damage [raidwide damage especially] has scaled as well so the name of the game is taking care of the damage as it comes in-- as a result most heal classes require you to leverage smart heals [which automatically target most injured players], heals over time, or absorbtions to be able to target who needs it faster than you ever could.

Usually to keep the heals interesting they use boss mechanics. One boss in MoP a few raids back had a day phase and night phase, where during the night phase the boss is a regular boss that everyone attacks and so on, but during the day phase the damage which the boss has taken and the health which the boss still has inverts and the healers have to heal him up while healing the rest of the raid as they protect the boss. On another boss in the current raid heals are automatically reduced to healing one hit point and the rest of the volume of the heal goes to putting a shield on the player which can be filled to absorb up to twice the players health-- but as a consequence there's three times as much damage going out as usual for both avoidable and unavoidable damage. I think that mixing it up like this is often what i like about healing, like Chimaeron was my favorite BwD boss besides maybe atramedes.

But yeah, I have heard from those who pilgrimaged to SwToR and back to WoW that healing is very very cool in SwToR. I've intended to try it as each of my friends were trying it but they all got to endgame and left so i still haven't really committed to any character for more than a few minutes in ToR. Also, blizzard has made my raiding-ass nothing but happy as they continue to try the new flexible style raids and such, so i'm highly unmotivated to change. I can understand how cataclysm would have driven you away. What cataclysm did have going for it was that pre-raid content was actually fun, dungeons were hard ect, but the raids were eh.

_________________Warning: The post you just read may contain little to no content, by reading this you hereby agree that it was read it at your sole discretion.

Also, for me as a healer, SWTOR is a much more fun game in PVE (and PVP). Tiered mana (energy, heat or force respectively) regeneration rate forcing you to ACTUALLY triage heal without gear affecting it was a massive change at first, but it really makes for a much more interesting game.

My main character in that game is a tank. Between all the pulls, grapples, stuns, shockwaves and force pushes, you need a good sense of orientation, because you are sometimes the proverbial ping pong ball getting bounced all over the battle field

Started to level up an imperial agent (Operative) to try my hand at the healer role.

Ironically, I spend a lot of money on this game (SWTOR) and what drew me in was that I could try for free first when it went f2p (i've been a subscriber since).

Has WoW ever had that kind of promotions or put f2p on the horizon as a possibility?

Has WoW ever had that kind of promotions or put f2p on the horizon as a possibility?

F2P not really. You can register a free account, but you're restricted to level 20 (out of a possible 90 at the moment), so it's really just long enough to try it (getting to level 20 nowadays is only a couple of hours of game time - it used to take much longer in the past).

They do have an in-game real money shop now though, like all of the F2P games, except of course you still need to pay a sub to be able to actually buy things from the in-game shop, and the Blizzard sheeple are dancing and singing and having group orgies like in A Brave New World.

Every now and then you can get the base package and some expansions for some small amount of money (usually 30€) in something Blizzard calls a "Battle Chest" - that comes with a free month of game time but NEVER with the latest addon for which they still charge full price (and people actually complained about the 8€ EA charged for Rise of the Hutt Cartel).

Funny that. I'd say the regular Blizzard fanboy is rendered from the same idiot stuff that Apple uses in the construction of their fanboys.

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